For most business owners, the tax year ends the same way. Documents go to a preparer, a return comes back, and the number at the bottom is accepted as the result. AE Tax Advisors is built on the view that by the time those documents arrive in February, most of the decisions that shaped that number have already been made.
The firm, headquartered in Billings, Montana, operates virtually and counts clients across 47 states, according to its own figures. It focuses on two overlapping groups: business owners generating $500,000 or more annually who have outgrown what a compliance-only relationship provides, and real estate investors whose portfolios involve enough moving parts that generalist coverage tends to leave money unaddressed. Engagements run year-round. The advisory team holds quarterly reviews and mid-year projections rather than appearing once at filing time.
Every new client starts with what AE Tax Advisors calls a 3-Year Tax Lookback. The advisory team reviews the three most recent federal returns, looking for what was missed or mishandled: deductions left unclaimed, credits that were never applied, and entity elections that may not have served the client optimally. That review forms the basis of a written plan tied to specific sections of the Internal Revenue Code, with a phased schedule for implementation. The annual engagement fee is $7,800, covering year-round access, the quarterly cadence, and monitoring of relevant changes in tax law.
Christina Nortman, a CPA and Managing Partner for the Northeast Region, leads the firm’s practice from Maryland. She holds a bachelor’s and master’s of science in accounting from the University of Baltimore. Before AE Tax Advisors, she worked at PwC and CohnReznick, according to the firm, both environments where tax methodology tends to be institution-wide and documented at every step. The clients she works with now are typically dealing with income arriving from several directions at once: a business, a rental portfolio, sometimes equity compensation stacking on top. The planning questions are different when any of those pieces change.
The advisory team includes Mark Simonsen, a CPA who built and leads the Mountain West practice from Montana, and Adam West, an Enrolled Agent who handles the Southeast from Macon, Georgia, where he is also a partner at Gonser, West and Associates. Krister Myrlonn, another Enrolled Agent based at the Billings headquarters, works on entity structuring and cost segregation studies. The firm’s advisory board brings in Jacob Simany, a tax attorney who previously litigated for the IRS Office of Chief Counsel and now runs Simany Law, focused on tax controversy and IRS dispute resolution.
Much of the firm’s work turns on decisions about how a business is organized. Whether to operate as an S-Corporation, a C-Corporation, or an LLC sitting under a holding company affects how income is taxed, how distributions flow, and what the exit eventually looks like. An S-Corp passes income through to the owner’s return; a C-Corp pays a flat 21 percent rate on retained earnings. For a business owner in the top individual bracket, the difference matters, and it is not simply a function of current income but of how much will be reinvested versus taken out.
Cost segregation is another significant piece of the practice. The discipline involves an engineering-based analysis of a real property that separates components from the main building structure and assigns them to shorter depreciation schedules. Where the standard recovery period for a residential rental property runs 27.5 years, and 39 years for commercial, certain interior finishes, land improvements, and personal property components can qualify for 5-year, 7-year, or 15-year treatment. This moves a portion of the depreciation deductions earlier. The firm says it has completed more than 500 such studies.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act, signed into law on July 4, 2025, permanently restored 100 percent bonus depreciation for qualified property acquired and placed in service after January 19, 2025. Before the legislation, the bonus depreciation rate had been stepping down annually toward zero. For an investor acquiring a property or a business owner buying equipment, the tax year in which an asset goes into service now carries more consequence than it did during the phasedown years.
AE Tax Advisors also handles Form 3115 studies, which allow property owners to claim depreciation they missed in earlier years without filing amended returns, along with S-Corporation elections, reasonable compensation documentation, retirement plan design, and exit planning for owners approaching a business sale. Multi-state nexus work and IRS audit defense are also part of the practice.
The three-year lookback that opens every engagement is partly a planning tool and partly a diagnostic. For some clients, the prior returns are mostly clean, and the work that follows is prospective. For others, the review surfaces things that had been sitting in filed returns for years with no one looking.
